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96 | 6 Refocusing Community College Programs Today almost half of all college-bound students start out in community colleges, which are the overwhelming destination for high school graduates whose parents lack a college degree. Historically, their primary mission was the transfer function: preparing students to move on to four-year colleges . In the last twenty years, however, there has been a movement toward also preparing students for immediate entry into the workforce with certification programs and two-year associate degrees. This chapter will argue that community colleges should reorganize spending and hiring priorities to strengthen and expand their occupational programs. In addition, they should strengthen their work with employers to encourage more internship and apprenticeship programs that allow students to earn while they learn and gain valuable occupational experience in their fields. These programs are in the best interest of the majority of community college students, who are often ill served by the emphasis given to the transfer function. Our position is not popular with many educational theorists. From the beginning, many of these individuals attacked any shift to occupational programs. Labeling such a shift “cooling out,” they claim that it creates a new form of tracking where occupational programs dissuade students away from the more financially rewarding four-year degrees into deadend , low-paying occupations. These critics of occupational programs are particularly troubled by the increasing entry of black and Latino students into the community college system. Given the long history of racist school tracking in the K-12 system, they fear that tracking is now being reproduced at the college level. To some degree, lines hardened after the 1996 welfare act. Critics were upset that the government provided very few long-term educational programs to prepare welfare recipients for work. First among this group are Katherine Shaw and Jerry Jacobs. After editing an issue of the Annals of the Refocusing Community College Programs | 97 American Academy of Political and Social Sciences that slammed the shifting emphasis of community colleges to occupational programs, they collaborated with others to publish Putting Poor People to Work (PPPW), a finalist for the prestigious C. Wright Mills Award.1 Condemning President Clinton’s “Make Work Pay” philosophy, the authors asserted that welfare recipients were “increasingly directed toward the most ineffective forms of training rather than toward higher-quality college-level education. . . . Under welfare reform, a significantly higher percentage of recipients participating in any type of education or training pursue only short-term, noncredit training .”2 As in their Annals publication, the authors claim that the work-to-work programs had undermined the traditional mission of community colleges as primarily institutions that prepare students to enter four-year programs. They lament, “Historically community colleges held their academic mission as primary, but now there is mounting pressure on them to adopt a workforce -preparation mission . . . [and] divert ambitious lower-class students away from four-year schools, channeling them instead into lower-status vocational programs.”3 Certainly given the long history of inappropriate tracking, one should not take lightly the risks that encouraging occupational programs may have. Moreover, the United States, more than most developed countries, is a “second chance” society where we believe that employment trajectories should not be determined solely by the choices individuals made in their teenage years. These concerns, however, should not blind us to evidence that for a substantial share of weakly prepared students, occupational programs offer the best alternative. As we shall see, a large share of students coming to the community college system have abysmal academic skills, which results in very low graduation rates. This evidence does not, however, cause most critics to change their assessment. They focus on the earnings gap between those who complete four-year degrees and those who do not. Those who succeed, they assert, enter the middle class, whereas those who do not are sentenced to a lifetime of economic deprivation. Given the choices, these critics believe that there is no alternative to their focus on the transfer function. After all, who can support an alternative if it consigns a large share of college students to a lifetime of destitution even if they succeed? The emphasis on four-year degrees is based upon the large current gap between the median earnings of those who attain four-year degrees and those without one. For example, the median usual weekly wages of workers, twenty-five years or older, with four-year degrees (and no higher) was $1,029; [18.117.183.49] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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